Hesperus Phosphorus moved

Powerblogs is shutting down, so we've moved Hesperus Phosphorus, the Southern California philosophy grad student blog, over to wordpress: http://hesperusphosphorus.wordpress.com.

Grading

I'm TAing for the first time this semester, and students have just turned in their first papers. A topic that lots of students are writing on is Newton's bucket argument for the existence of absolute (rather than Leibnizian relative) space. The set up of the thought experiment is to imagine a bucket filled with water spinning all alone in the universe. Grading so far isn't very fun, and is mostly frustrating. But, I just saw this line in a paper on the bucket argument, and it lightened the mood a bit:

"Newton's bucket argument fails to hold water"

Blogging as grad students

I've just posted over at Hesperus/Phosphorus about blogging as grad students. Check it out; I'm interested to know what you guys think.

Intuition check

Suppose I am trying to decide what to do with my evening off. I've been invited to go to the bar, but I also am out of milk, which I like to use every morning. Emmy gives me the following advice:

(1) You ought to go to the store.

Suppose Chris overhears Emmy's claim. Later, he is talking to Mike, who is wondering what I should do tonight. Mike knows that I'm out of milk, but also knows that I have a chapter of my dissertation due tomorrow. Chris reports

(2) Emmy said that Justin ought to go to the store.

Do any of the following sound true?

(i) Chris reported falsely.
(ii) Chris's report is inappropriate.
(iii) Chris has misrepresented Emmy.
(iv) Chris's report is misleading.

Suppose Mike thinks I ought to stay home and work on my dissertation.

Does this sound true?

(v) Emmy and Mike disagree.

New semester

The new semester starts tomorrow. I'll be learning something about Aristotle, perception, and normativity. Besides that, I'm doing an independent study on deontic modals (specifically, I'm trying to develop a contrastivist account of ought ascriptions), and TAing a course on time and time travel.

Over the summer, I didn't accomplish quite as much as I had hoped, though I did get a paper out to try and get it published. I've been told by a source I trust that it will be accepted, but I haven't heard anything official yet, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed for that. I also submitted a paper to a conference and read a lot of stuff. But mostly I watched a lot of TV online (I rediscovered Freaks and Geeks, which is a really good show), moved, and visited my family back east.

A friend pointed me to this video on youtube that will be useful for my teaching this semester. It seems like a good way to tell students what they need to know about relativity to get the argument against presentism from the Special Theory of Relativity.

Best acknowledgements ever

It's pretty standard to include some sort of acknowledgements (/acknowledgments...either is correct, I think) in a paper/book. Usually, they go something like:

"Thanks to so-and-so for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper."

But, I think if you really want to give someone credit, you should put this:

"Without so-and-so's comments, this paper would have been worse than it is - that is, it would have been impossible."

What's supposed to be puzzling?

I'm just starting Scanlon's "Reasons: A Puzzling Duality?", in Reason and Value: Themes from the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz. He considers the question of whether an agent's intended ends can give her reasons that she otherwise would not have had. This sounds plausible to me. But, there is supposed to be a puzzle if we also want to accept the claim that we can have reasons which are independent of our choices. Here is Scanlon:

"This gives rise to a puzzle about what it is to be a reason - that is to say, a consideration that counts in favor of some action or attitude. If the normative status of counting in favor of acting a certain way is something that certain considerations can just have, how can it also be something that we can confer on certain considerations by our choice of ends?" (p. 231)

Now, I think that Scanlon will go on to argue that there is not really a puzzle here, after all. But, I just don't feel even the initial force. Am I missing something? Why is this combination supposed to be puzzling?